Site Mobile Navigation

NBC Reveals Displeasure as U.S.O.C. Unveils Plan

The head of NBC Sports said Thursday that he broke off talks in April about combining the Olympic channel that it partly owns with the one being planned by the United States Olympic Committee.

“There were conversations on and off for at least a year, and we took it off the table,” said Dick Ebersol, the chairman of NBC Sports. In that plan, Universal Sports, NBC’s joint venture with InterMedia Partners, would have merged with the United States Olympic Network, which the U.S.O.C. said Wednesday will begin in 2010.

“It would have been much richer for the American viewer,” Ebersol said in a telephone interview. He said he was disappointed and that because they were “such long-term partners,” he had hoped “that they would have paid more attention to our bid and a channel that would have had a better chance of succeeding.”

The U.S.O.C. chose Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, as its partner. Comcast will be giving the network broad digital basic distribution.

U.S.O.C. officials said they could not find financial common ground with NBC.

“We made every effort to stay engaged with them and find an arrangement that was economically and strategically viable for all parties,” said Norm Bellingham, the committee’s chief operating officer.

The timing of the U.S.O.C.’s plan was condemned as hasty Wednesday by Richard Carrión, an International Olympic Committee executive board member from Puerto Rico. On Thursday, the I.O.C. issued a statement that further condemned the American committee for acting “unilaterally” by announcing its network “before we had a chance to consider together the ramifications.” The statement continued, “The proposed channel raises complex legal and contractual issues and could have a negative impact on our relationships with other Olympic broadcasters,” including NBC.

Ebersol said that this latest I.O.C.-U.S.O.C. dispute — a few months after the two organizations reached a temporary truce over the distribution of television and sponsorship revenue — could have ramifications on Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Summer Games.

Photo

It would have been much richer for the American viewer, Dick Ebersol said of the failed venture between the U.S.O.C. and NBC.Credit
Jack Dempsey/Associated Press

“This so unnecessarily reopens all the wounds,” Ebersol said. “Chicago will be impacted because the electorate that will decide will wonder what the U.S.O.C. is up to and what the urgency was.” The I.O.C. is to vote on the bids by Chicago, Tokyo, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro on Oct. 2 in Copenhagen.

Stephanie Streeter, the acting chief executive of the U.S.O.C., said that she believed the network’s approach, and its grass-roots support of the Olympic movement, “is in line with what the bid is trying to do.”

The timing of the U.S.O.C.’s network announcement also surprised Skip Gilbert, chief executive of USA Triathlon. He said that he and the leaders of other Olympic sports’ national governing bodies were thrilled at the prospect of an Olympic network, but said “this was dropped on us without any input or feedback.”

Gilbert, who is the chairman of the National Governing Bodies Association, said he is preparing a list of questions about the network for Streeter. He and his colleagues want to know more about how thoroughly the U.S.O.C. researched consumer demand for the network and whether this move signals a shift in the organization’s core mission, toward becoming a media organization.

Bellingham said that it would have been wrong to solicit input from the governing bodies while negotiating the elements of its deal with Comcast. “There’s still a great deal to be done, and we’re very encouraged already by the responses” from those organizations, he said.

Ultimately, this is a fight between the influence of NBC, which has poured billions of dollars into televising the Summer and Winter Games, and the U.S.O.C., which wants to build a valuable TV asset but lacks a media infrastructure. In the middle is the I.O.C., which has done business with NBC in the United States almost exclusively since 1992.

In its plan, the U.S.O.C. is far more focused than NBC on exposing the least-seen sports to viewers.

“I question its commercial viability absent the major sports,” Ebersol said of the U.S.O.C.’s plan.

In 1999, he said, he and Juan Antonio Samaranch, then the I.O.C. president, talked about starting an Olympic channel. “We’d do it first in the U.S. and it would be a model for the rest of the world,” he said. But subsequent research found that “less than one-tenth of 1 percent” of those surveyed showed any interest in such a channel.

Katie Thomas contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page B10 of the New York edition with the headline: NBC Reveals Displeasure As U.S.O.C. Unveils Plan. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe